Between OBJ and GEJ and others in-between (I)

Last weekend, Leadership (December 21) published a story in which it quoted former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, (OBJ) as saying on his Facebook wall on December 20 that, following his controversial December 2 letter to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) which he ominously titled “Before it is too late”, it was time Nigerians turned on the heat in the polity so that only the best party should win the next general elections in 2015.

“It is now time,” the newspaper quoted him as saying, “to turn up the heat. May the best party win.” In the light of his letter in which he admonished his estranged benefactor and godson to shape up or ship out, Obasanjo’s call for Nigerians to turn on the heat was clearly his coded way of asking Nigerians to throw out the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the next elections, the very party that gave him the platform to rule the country as its first elected president since 1985 and a party which he once boasted will rule Nigeria for a long, long time, if not forever.

His call for Nigerians to turn up the heat also looked, at least to me, like a call on the select Nigerian leaders – Generals Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma and Dr Alex Ekwueme with whom he said he had shared the content of his letter and who he also said shared his concerns – to speak out in his support.

So far none has and it’s highly unlikely that anyone of them will. Up till now the only one among them who has said anything about the letter is General Danjuma and he has categorically said he will not criticise GEJ in the open. “I have complete and unimpeded access to the president,” he said in a goodwill message to the 6th Abuja Festival of Praise on the night of December 20 in response to what he said have been repeated calls by the press for him to say something about the letter, “and if I have anything to say to him, I will do so face to face. These are difficult times and we must be careful, especially as leaders on what we say in public.”

The general’s argument of unimpeded access to the president precluding his speaking out does not look quite tenable; in November 2003 he spoke out against Obasanjo as a president that he said he found out was under the spell of a cult-like clique. At that time he had just left Obasanjo’s administration as the defense minister and he had complete and unimpeded access to the Obasanjo.

Five years later, he said even more terrible things about his former friend and boss. In an interview with The Guardian (February 17, 2008) marking his 70th birthday he condemned Obasanjo as “the most toxic leader that Nigeria has produced so far.” The country, he said, “took him out of jail and made him a president; he abused Nigeria, he deceived Nigeria and he deserves a second term in prison and we will make sure he ends up there.”

By then Obasanjo was, of course, no longer president but, on General Danjuma’s own contention, his friend still ruled Nigeria by proxy “through Yar’Adua, his puppet.” At the time Danjuma still had complete and unimpeded access to his friend and to President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

So if the general has rejected calls for him to speak out on Obasanjo’s letter, it would not be because you speak truth to power only when you do not have complete and unimpeded access to those in power.

In any case his attack on Obasanjo back in 2003 would not be the first time he’s spoken out against those in power even when they were completely accessible to him. There has to be other reasons for his reticence this time, probably foremost of which is his well publicised falling out with Obasanjo over the former president’s successful move to partially take away the oil well the general had been allocated by the late military head of state, General Sani Abacha, an oil well which has since proved one of the most lucrative in the country.

As for Generals Babangida and Abubakar and Chief Ekwueme, they too, like General Danjuma, are more likely than not to maintain strategic silence, strategic because while they know much of what Obasanjo said in his letter is true, as we shall see next week, God willing, they do not want to offend or embarrass President Jonathan with whose government they’ve been doing good and brisk business in many sectors of the economy.

Their strategic silence is also probably because they believe Obasanjo lacks the moral authority to condemn the president for all the offences he has charged the president with, not least of all the charges of bad faith and divisiveness. For, make no mistake about it, before Jonathan came along, Obasanjo was the most divisive president we’ve had in this country and someone whose word you took to your bank at your own peril, as I have tried to show in innumerable articles I have written about the man on these pages and elsewhere, one of which I shall reproduce on these pages in two weeks time, God willing, for its relevance to the ongoing controversy about his letter even though mine was written eleven years ago.

The point of all this is that clearly Obasanjo is on his own in this letter writing business as a strategy of wrong footing President Jonathan. Worse for him, it seems the heat he wants President Jonathan and the PDP to be subjected to has been turned on him, first, from a quarter he – and probably most Nigerians, including this reporter – least expected and, second, from the reply to his letter by his erstwhile godson.

Once upon a time, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, before he became arguably the most trenchant defender of President Obasanjo during his second term, described him as a Mr. Know-It-All and a stooge of not only the much maligned “Fulani caliphate.” Fani-Kayode said Obasanjo was also a stooge of “his Western European backers…and his friends at the IMF and the World Bank.” The man, he concluded, in that clearly malicious article in The Comet (March 18, 2001), since rested, “may end in utter disaster and shame.”

At the time Fani-Kayode wrote those words not even he in his wildest thoughts could have imagined that the former president’s “disaster and shame” would come in the shape of a daughter who seemed to have benefitted most from being an Obasanjo, namely, Iyabo, a veterinary doctor and a PhD in public health.

Iyabo is not the first to visit opprobrium upon her father; years ago Gbenga, her brother from the same mother, accused his old man of sleeping with his wife in a sworn affidavit. Being a man apparently with a crocodile skin, the accusation did not appear to “shake his coat”, as we say in local parlance.

Iyabo’s charge against her father in a letter that was indeed a “red hot exclusive”, as the editors of Vanguard which published it on December 18 described it, must have rattled the man no end. Inspired, as she herself said, by her father’s 18-page letter to President Jonathan, she wrote her old man an 11-page letter dated December 16 in which she accused him of being “a liar, manipulator, a two-faced hypocrite” and a cruel and criminally negligent father and husband. Disaster and shame don’t come any worse than someone your own loins sired and who most people thought was your favourite, saying such unprintable things about you to the whole world, especially at a time you’d picked to fight a critical battle of your life.

It was a sign of how much he was rattled that he called her while he was visiting in the US where she is now resident to confirm if she could indeed pen such blasphemy. Equally, it was a sign how much shame she must have known she has brought unto her family that she initially denied writing it.

Feedback

Re: The persecution of Governor Lamido

Two weeks ago I promised to publish a very thoughtful reaction to my piece on the subject above last week but didn’t. My apologies. Below is a shortened and edited version of the reaction.

Sir,

I am yet to see people from the North call out their leaders to account. But instead what we have seen is people demonising Jonathan. I am not saying ‘don’t question Jonathan.’ All I’m saying is, let’s question from home first.

I am a Muslim and from your name you seem to be one also. So let me use the religion angle.

Tribal leaders in the desert and outside the Arabian Peninsula came to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and gave their allegiance to Islam and the Prophet himself agreeing to be ruled by him. Many people say that Islam was spread by the sword. But it only happened because of the leadership of the Prophet and the justice that reigned in Islam. Today many in the West are beginning to understand how Islam was spread.

If the Prophet was seeking justice outside his kingdom without firstly, trying to clean up his own house, do you think Islam as we know it would have existed? But of course if you are a Muslim you most likely already know all of these. I hope we can do what is right. May God make it easy (for us all).

Abdul’Aziz ibn Ibrahim

Sir,

I’m neither your fan nor apologist because I can’t stand your ethno-religious irredentism. But those who attacked you because of Lamido’s article should, if they can read English, read where you said, “This does NOT, of course, mean Lamido’s sons should not be prosecuted & their father exposed as….a hypocrite…”